Search Query: MILTON FRIEDMAN

Search Results

You searched for "MILTON FRIEDMAN" and here's what we found ...

What If Obama Believed in Individual Liberty and Free Markets?

by
President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address on January 12, 2016, and devoted most of the time to defending his “legacy” of bigger and more intrusive government, with an emphasis on the other aspects of personal and social life he wished could come under the blanket of more political paternalism, if only there was enough time before he leaves office on January 20, 2017. But suppose that, instead, Obama had had an epiphany shortly before he spoke before the Congress on January 12th. Imagine that he had had a realization that the Progressive and political paternalistic ideas that he has believed in, espoused and implemented during his first seven years in the office of the presidency had been wrong and misguided. What if he had discovered the ideas, say, of Ayn Rand, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, and F. A. Hayek, for example? Suppose that he realized that the true principles of a free society were to ...

The Government Must Stop Printing Phony Money

by
If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government. For more than two hundred years, practically all of even the most free market advocates have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets. From Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the presumption has been that competitive markets and free consumer choice are far better than government control and planning – except in the realm of money and financial intermediation. This belief has been taken to the extreme over the last one hundred years, during which governments have claimed virtually absolute and unlimited authority over national monetary systems through the institution of paper money. At least before the First World War (1914-1918) the general consensus among economists, ...

Kevin Carson versus the Straw Man

by
A couple of days ago, Kevin Carson, who holds the position of Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at an organization called The Center for a Stateless Society, published an attack on Richard Ebeling and me, entitled “Libertarian-splaining to the Poor.” Carson describes himself as a “left libertarian,” which Wikipedia defines as one who subscribes to “anti-authoritarian varieties of left-wing politics, either anarchism in general or social anarchism in particular.” Carson’s attack arose out of last week’s segment of our weekly Internet show, The Libertarian Angle, whose theme was “Do Libertarians Really Hate the Poor?” Carson wrote: Every single item in their discussion is on the same general theme: making the rich even richer or otherwise empowering them so they can help the poor. Of course they tip their hat to the existence of some “corporatism” in the Gilded Age, but go on to treat it as a marginal phenomenon in a system that was mostly laissez-faire. Indeed the defining ...

The JFK Assassination and the Inconceivable Doctrine

by
Despite the large amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to the culpability of the U.S. national-security state in the assassination of President Kennedy, there are still some people who exclaim “Conspiracy theory!” whenever someone challenges the official finding of the Warren Commission that JFK was felled by a former Marine lone-nut communist using a junk Italian-made World War II rifle ...